Director Tim Burton was beginning to worry me. Not since 1994's ED WOOD has he done a really solid piece of work that I could whole heartedly recommend to pretty much everyone. MARS ATTACKS! is junkie, SLEEPY HOLLOW was pretty good but mostly due to Johnny Depp's bizarre performance, and PLANET OF THE APES was a surprisingly so-so Hollywood actioner that was extremely easy to forget five minutes after it had ended. BIG FISH may surprise people, particularly Burton's oldest fans who remember just how twisted (BEETLEJUICE, BATMAN) this guy can get. BIG FISH is shockingly normal. The film it most reminded me of in terms of its way of telling a story was FORREST GUMP. Only in this film, the lead character, Edward Bloom (played as an older man by Albert Finney and played younger in flashbacks by Ewan McGregor), isn't taking part in world events; he is the event, at least the way he tells the story.
I'm not spoiling anything by saying that Finney's Bloom is a dying man, estranged from his only son William (Billy Crudup), because William is sick to death of Edward's tall tales. There isn't a story you, can come up with that Edward can't top. He has elaborate concoctions about the war, about his days working in the circus, about falling in love with his eventual wife, Sandy (old: Jessica Lange; young: Alison Lohman), and about his time marketing freaks (giants, conjoined twins) into top-notch entertainment acts. He has boyhood tales of meeting a witch and seeing how he is going to die. These are great stories, and McGregor portrays the younger Edward as a man who simply accepts these strange occurrences in his life with a dignified elegance. He's the most polite man you could ever meet, and McGregor sells his southern accent with much zeal. It's fairly obvious that Burton had the most fun filming the scenes at the circus (with ringmaster Danny Devito) than, say, the sequence in the world's most perfect town, which basically doesn't go anywhere. Although it's in these scenes that we meet a famous writer named Norther Winslow played by Steve Buscemi, so it's not so bad.
As much fun as I had watching the adventures of Edward Bloom, I could kind of tell where things were leading. One way or the other, we would discover that whether Edward's stories were really fiction or not. But things don't quite play out that way. William does a little investigating and discovers a mysterious woman named Jenny (Helena Bonham Carter). Was she Edward's mistress? I'm not telling. But I will say that the scenes with Bonham Carter are the ones that finally pulled me in emotionally to BIG FISH. I actually started caring with my heart about Edward's fate and his believability. I cared about whether the relationship with his son gets mended. There are also some sweet scenes between Finney and Lange that got to me. These moments with the female leads are the ones that elevated BIG FISH in my mind, not only in comparison to Burton's other recent films, but also compared to much of what is in theatres now. BIG FISH is Burton's most emotionally satisfying film since EDWARD SCISSORHANDS, and it verifies that his abilities as a compelling storyteller have not abandoned him; they just weren't be serviced with great material. It's nice to see Burton stretch his wings beyond what's expected of him every once and a while. The film opens around the country on Christmas day.
Posted by sprokopy at December 16, 2003 07:21 PM